Via The Office Weblog comes news that Basecamp is offering free Basic accounts for teachers. Basecamp is an online project management tool that offers users the ability to create todo lists, file sharing, and collaborative editing and has great potential for educational use — say, allowing students to collaborate on group projects. The Basic account lets you manage up to 15 projects at once and to upload files (while their trial-level Free account only allows 1 project and no file sharing) and should be more than adequate for those whose classes aren’t 300-student lecture-hall types. They say “drop us a line” if your interested; the only email address I’ve come across is support@basecamphq.com, which I’ve sent an email to; I’ll post an update if this turns out not to be the best way to contact them.
6 thoughts on “Tools: Free Basecamp Accounts for Teachers”
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I’ve found that PMWiki works better for me than Basecamp, although I suppose it isn’t for everybody. It is very easy to install if you have access to a networked computer where you can install it.
I haven’t used Basecamp much (other than to play around with) but one of the things that impresses me is how easy it is to use and how integrated everything is. I could set up a wiki that would do a lot of the same stuff, but Basecamp has already done that. The thing that would really make this work for me personally, though, is full-fledged word processing — if folks could upload a Word doc (or, dare I say it, an Ooo sxw…) and edit it, keeping the formatting, that would be ideal. I know, plain text is teh woot, but trying to get academic work done in plain text just doesn’t fly. Still, I think it’s a great step for Basecamp, as having a system like this already set up and ready to go should make a lot of creative applications possible for teachers.
My biggest problem with basecamp is that its todo lists aren’t hierarchical.
Projjex.com is a great new site that does a fabulous job of project management. It’s completely browser-based, really easy to use, and has a free version. Cool videos too – I love it!
In a class I recently took, the professor had us use the free version of OnStage http://www.onstageportal.com for our group projects. I think the free version allowed us to setup 20 projects with 750MB of storage. It worked very well.
Basecamp is developed by Web-designers for Web-designers. I couldn’t use this tool with my students. However, the offer of free accounts for teachers does sound great. Anyway, I’m usng Wrike for big group projects and they give me a 40% discount. I think it’s a good deal for what they offer (unlimited number of projects and terrific flexibility).